Christmas in the Kitchens
by Wilhelmina Willoughby
Summary: When she gets to the Kitchens, she doesn't expect James Potter to be there. James drops the spoon he's holding. It clatters into the bowl of batter and disappears beneath the surface. A glob of it lands on his jumper. "No! No. Come in. I'm making cookies. For Sirius."


My Jily Secret Santa present for Ale, whose prompt included their first date or first kiss. A little of both for the holidays. I hope you like it! Happy Holidays :)

* * *

Lily wakes up on Christmas Eve and can't breathe. Blindly she reaches for the box of tissues on her end table and blows her nose, lets the disgusting thing fall to the floor with the others. She ought to clean up. She knows she's kind of piggish, right now, with the used tissues and the rat's nest of her hair and the deep bags she can feel sagging under her eyes, but it's Christmas Eve and she's sick and her parents are dead and really, what's the point?

So she yanks her blankets up, rolls over, and lies there with her eyes closed until she falls asleep again.

**.o.O.o.**

A nightmare wakes her up the second time. Heart pounding, gasping for air, she sits up and watches the sun filter through the colored glass in the window. If all the moisture in her body wasn't currently busy with clogging up her nose and sticking so annoying to the inside of her throat—if she hadn't tired herself out with crying so much last night, she might let herself do it now.

Nightmare.

Her mother and father, smiling at her. Her mother's warm knit sweater. The glint of her father's wedding ring off the candle on the windowsill. The two of them standing in front of the fireplace, watching the still photographs of their family on the hearth. They smell like peppermint and cocoa and Lily comes between them to hold their hands, and somewhere in the background a record plays, Slade or Roy Wood or Gilbert O'Sullivan, and Lily feels their words.

There are no skeletons or demons or Death Eaters. Nothing bad happens. Lily stands with her parents in their home and smiles.

It'll never happen again.

_And Petunia, sunning herself in the Caribbean with the Dursleys, _Lily thinks viciously, glaring at her clock. It glares back. 12:35. _Maybe you should get out of bed._

She does. She pulls her robe on over her pajamas, her prefect's badge gleaming, and yanks a brush through her hair. Halfway through struggling with a knot, she gives up and pulls it into a ponytail. Mostly everybody is home for the holidays, anyway, and Lily's just planning on nicking some food from the Kitchens and maybe coming back up to the tower and moping about. Maybe she'll read a book. Maybe she'll start on some early reading for her spring classes. Maybe she'll try to force herself to sleep until they start.

When she gets to the Kitchens, she doesn't expect James Potter to be there.

"Uh," she says, halfway into the room. She pulls her robe tighter around her body, as if he can't see the leg of her plaid pajama pants sticking through, and starts backing away. "I'll just—"

James drops the spoon he's holding. It clatters into the bowl of batter and disappears beneath the surface. A glob of it lands on his jumper. He struggles to stand—the table is low, made for elves, and it's clear it took him a lot of effort to find a comfortable position for his long limbs. "No! No. Come in. I was making cookies. For. Uh. Sirius."

"For Sirius."

"Yeah. He's having some family drama so I thought, why not?" He reaches in for the spoon, pointer finger and thumb covered in batter, and grins at her.

One of the house elves gasps. "Mister _Potter!_"

"What?"

"A mess! You are making a mess! Against the agreement we made. Promised no messes, and Christmas dinner yet to be made! We are _busy!_"

James glances at Lily with comically wide eyes—which makes her giggle, God help her—and hands the spoon to the house elf, who snatches it away. "Sorry, Perla. Look, Lily Evans is here to help. She'll keep me on task."

"Make sure you do," Perla says, stomping away.

Lily steps into the room and lets the door fall shut behind her. The warmth from the many fireplaces is nice, even if she can't fully smell everything being cooked on them, and the way James is smiling at her causes something warm to unfurl in her chest. "Thanks for volunteering me," she says, shuffling up to his low table. "Appreciate it. Working on holiday, always fun."

He shrugs. "Fun when it's you."

She doesn't know what to say to this, so she ducks her head—_he is flirting with me and I look like I've just crawled out of the Shrieking Shack—_and looks at all the ingredients he's got splayed across the table. Eggs and flour and chocolate chips, an over-turned, empty measuring cup, several different sized spoons. His mixing bowl sits between them, and she can't help it. She reaches out and runs her finger along the side, tastes the batter.

"Not bad, Potter."

"Not bad? Not bad? This is my great-granny's recipe, passed down the generations! You wait, Lily Evans. You just wait. Get these things out of the oven and they'll be the best bloody cookies you've had in your life."

**.o.O.o.**

They're silent as she helps him spoon the dough onto the long pans. She doesn't know how much he's made, but it never seems to end—pan after pan they fill, spoonful of spoonful they sneak, as if the other isn't looking, as if Lily's ignored the fact that James spent an entire pan's worth of time simply eating the dough and not helping. At last, when they're finished, James finds a spare oven and pushes them in.

"Alright," he says, brushing his flour-covered hands onto his trousers and glancing at his watch. He folds his gangly body back onto the small table. "Twenty minutes."

"Has Sirius had these before?"

"He's been to my house plenty, yeah. Dad says these are holiday cookies, but Mum likes to have them all the time, so we do."

"My grandmother used to make her own biscuits, said she didn't like the ones Mum bought from the store. They used to have this row every single Christmas—"

Lily swallows the thick knot in her throat. Parents, and holiday cookies, and the chocolate sticking to her teeth. She doesn't want to cry in front of James Potter. She wants to be at home, with those stupid biscuits, and her stupid sister, and those stupid made-up songs her father used to sing, but they've been taken from her and she won't ever—

A weight on her hand pulls her gaze back. James's fingers rest across her own, his thumb rubbing gentle circles across her knuckles. He doesn't say anything, only looks at her with those green-brown eyes and a soft smile and waits for her. To continue. To turn away. To confess about her nightmares, or joke about his granny's cookies, or call him an idiot. Ever patient. She hates him for it. She loves him for it, too, and wonders when that happened.

"So, um." Not too quietly, she clears her throat and turns her palm up so that theirs press together on the table. "So, every Christmas they would row about whose cookies were better, and try to get us to choose sides. Dad would try to side with Mum, of course, but grandmother was his own Mum, so it never really worked out. And Petunia liked grandmother's because grandmother bought her the best presents."

"And what about you?"

"I told them that they were both delicious so that I could have more biscuits, duh."

James laughs. "Smart thinking."

"It happens."

They lapse into silence. From somewhere in the depths of the Kitchens, Perla yells something about her honey-glazed hams, which is followed by a chorus of frantic squeaking. Lily wishes she could smell the cookies baking.

"Are you doing anything later today?" James asks.

"Do I look presentable enough to go out into the world?"

"You came down here."

"Desperation."

"Look," he says, linking their fingers together. "Sirius and I were thinking of having a feast in the Common Room tonight. Lots of food and sweets and maybe some pilfered alcohol that we certainly did not come by illegally—don't look at me like that—and music and games and no talk of family. What do you say?"

"He won't mind you bringing along a plus one?"

He shrugs, smiles at her so earnestly that she can't predict what he might say. She doesn't know how his face has gotten so close to hers, or if she's the one who leaned forward across the table, or if it was him, or if they've both just been gravitating closer all along. "You're one of us," he says, as if it's no big deal. She can feel the brush of his words against her lips. "Say you'll come."

"How can I not come to a Potter-Black Smorgasbord?"

"It's impossible to resist. We're charming."

"Or maybe it's just your granny's cookies, Potter."

"Or maybe it's just me."

_He's going to kiss me,_ she thinks, glancing at his lips. Her fingers twitch in his grasp—she remembers her morning breath, and her messy, knotted ponytail, and the dark circles underneath her eyes—she remembers that this is James and they're in the Kitchens and then she corrects, _We're going to kiss, I am going to kiss him back, _and she doesn't know what to feel about anything—

Her last line of resistance, the only out that she gives him—that she gives herself—to stop this before they change everything, is, "You shouldn't. I'm sick."

"Don't care," he says, bringing his free hand up to rest against her neck.

"You'll catch it."

His hand skates up her neck, cups her cheek, tilts her head. She watches the glint of firelight off his glasses and the gold that dances in his eyes, feels her pulse thrum loud in her head. "Don't care," he whispers against her lips, and then he presses forward, and his tongue tastes like sugar and chocolate and honey, and she drops his hand to thread her fingers in his hair, and she hates that there is a damned table between them and the fact that her nose is so clogged that she really _can't _breathe—

She pulls back, sneezes. From across the table, James laughs, a little dazed. He's got flour in his hair and a patch on his cheek and some on his jumper, and she's sure she might look the same picture. It doesn't help when Perla swings around the corner, brandishing a spatula.

"Are you going to pull your cookies? Or does Perla have to do everything around here?"

"I've got it, Perla, thank you," James says, winking at Lily. He leaves their little table—banging his knee on the bench, and knocking over the baking soda, and getting tripped up over his own shoelaces, and he's a little like a gangly, awkward, endearing giraffe that Lily can't help but smile at. When he pulls the pans and brings over a plate of them, hot and gooey, he's grinning.

And she can admit it: they're the best damn cookies she's ever had. But mostly because they taste like James's kiss.


End file.
